A Colourful Performance

It may not come as a surprise to you now, if you’ve read our past reviews, but small system builds are in vogue now amongst enthusiasts. This is helped by small components like motherboards and GPUs that perform just as well as their full-sized counterparts. This time around, ASUS has sent us their ASUS B150I Pro Gaming/WiFi/Aura motherboard, which adds a bit of colour to your build.

The ASUS B150I Pro Gaming/WiFi/Aura is a Mini-ITX board, which are some of the smallest one can find in the market right now. The motherboard features two DDR4 DIMM slots, which is capable of supporting up to 32GBs of RAM, four SATA III ports, one M.2 port at the back, and one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.

As far as I/O is concerned, the B150I Pro Gaming has two each of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, one USB Type-C port, as well as one HDMI and DVI port for video output. On top of that, the motherboard also features support for 802.11ac MU-MIMO technology which helps users obtain the best WiFi connection that one can get.

Another feature that this particular motherboard has is the Aura RGB Lighting that is more commonly seen in some of ASUS’ more high-end line of motherboards. The company likely thought that some small system builders would love to have lighting options on their motherboards as well and added it in to the B150I.

ASUS’ Aura software allows users to control the RGB LEDs at the side of the monitor, and has even included a number of lighting schemes, including static, breathing, rainbow and others. In fact, you can even set the colours to change based on CPU temperature and load as well, so you know how hard your processor is working while you’re gaming, or doing some other CPU-intensive task.

Despite being a small motherboard, we also mentioned that ITX-sized motherboards perform just as well as their desktop counterparts. Throughout our benchmarks and various testing, the motherboard performed very well, not giving us any problems whatsoever. The unfortunate bit is that the B150 boards don’t exactly allow for overclocks, but depending on your needs, you may not even need it.

CHIP CONCLUDE: The ASUS B150I Pro Gaming/WiFi/Aura motherboard is an excellent choice for system builders who want a bit of colour in their PCs, while not sacrificing performance.